Employment

The Romans never invented the stirrup. What we call a ‘chest of drawers’ was unknown before the late 17th century – before which time you had to store your valued possessions in a deep coffer or chest. The doorknob did not exist until 1878. The tea bag was invented by accident in the early 20th century when a New York tea merchant sent out samples of tea in small silk bags. Travelling into an office to spend a day performing work which could easily be done at home suddenly seems as absurd as buying a CD The evolutionary process by which new ideas are conceived and adopted seems linear and

Zero-sum game Sir: Though troubled by the impact of Budget measures on employers and economic growth, I am more baffled by the regressive nature of those measures on the most vulnerable sectors – retail, hospitality, social care and students (‘Tax, spend, borrow’, 2 November). While the employer of a full-time employee earning £50,000 a year will see a cost increase of 2 per cent, the comparable increases for a full-time adult, a half-time adult and a 16-hour-a-week student on the minimum wage are 10.4 per cent, 13.1 per cent and a staggering 23.2 per cent respectively – and retail and hospitality are also hit by a major reduction in business

The legendary music producer Rick Rubin once asked me why I had never moved to the United States. The answer, I think, comes down to an important trade-off: quantity of earnings vs quality of consumption. Historically, once you had a job, there was a limit to the lifestyle choices you could make Whereas the United States is certainly a better place to earn and accumulate money, Europe is, on balance, still a better place to spend it. (Which may explain why Rick asked me that question at his summer home in Italy.) This imbalance partly arises from a fundamental asymmetry in the transmission of ideas. Whenever anything good or interesting

I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read that the Prime Minister had said he would slash red tape and ‘rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment’ as part of a bid to persuade global business executives to invest in UK plc. Is this the same Keir Starmer whose government has just published an Employment Rights Bill that will tip a wastepaper basket full of red tape over employers’ heads? I know all governments pledge to ‘free up’ British businesses and then smother them in new regulations, but this wins first prize. Employers will be liable if they fail to protect employees from overheard conversations, but also T-shirts, badges

Old tortoise that I am, my head usually yanks back into my shell when people start talking about artificial intelligence. One reason for this is laziness in the face of the challenge of learning to understand a deep and complex subject. I’m not proud of that. But of another reason I’m unashamed. Societies standing at the brink of a massive leap forward in technology have never been much good at predicting where the innovation will lead. The printing press, telegraphy, typewriting and motor car; the wireless and television; the telephone, the tank, the mobile phone… who would have guessed usefully at the landscape into which these inventions would usher us?

Gold standard The Paralympics were instigated in 1948 and first held alongside the Olympics in Rome in 1960. But disabled athletes were competing in the Olympics long before that – notably George Eyser, a German who settled in St Louis, USA. That he had lost a leg after being run over by a train and wore a wooden prosthetic did not stop him taking up athletics and gymnastics. When the Olympics came to his city in 1904 he won three golds: in the parallel bars, long horse vault and 25ft rope climb. He won three other medals, on the pommel horse, horizontal bars and in a team event. He also

Party season Unusually, the Conservatives are holding their party conference before the Labour party. It has become tradition that the Lib Dems hold theirs one week, Labour the next and the Conservatives the week after that, with the latter concluding in the first week of October. The tradition held even in 2020 when conferences moved online due to Covid. But there was a year when the normal conferences didn’t take place: 1974, when the second general election of the year was held during that time. Labour did, however, hold a shorter conference in late November in London. With October touted as a date for next year’s general election, we may

Imagine that, just as Britain was closing down for the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020, you were 18 years old and had received an offer from the university of your choice, subject to good exam results. The grades proved to be no problem – with all exams cancelled, you were graded in accordance with your teacher’s estimate of how you would perform, and sailed through. But then the time came to go to university and you couldn’t – not properly, anyway. ‘Lots of students end up in jobs deemed to be low-skilled that would not need a degree in the first place’ You kept finding yourself imprisoned

Are you happy in your work? In 37 years of journalism I don’t remember once being asked that question by my bosses. Nor did I expect to be. But in the civil service there is a bureaucratic machine to make sure employees are asked once a year if everything is all right, dearie. At unpublicised cost, the People Survey invites penpushers to complain. Guess what – they do. Three mandarins explained this time-consuming exercise to the Commons public administration select committee. They were: Alex Chisholm, the civil service’s chief operating officer; Fiona Ryland, ‘government chief people officer’; Dr Claudia Roscini, head of the civil service People Survey team. The survey

Home The number of people not working due to long-term sickness rose to a record 2.5 million, many with mental sickness or back pain, according to the Office for National Statistics. Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that income tax could be cut by 2p in the pound if Britons who had left the workforce during the pandemic returned to work. Pay growth in the public sector rose to 5.6 per cent, the highest rate since 2003. Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing union, said that the Health Secretary should ‘start off in double figures’ in pay negotiations. The Bank of England expected